I look at IBM as an example. Their one constant has been their ability to pick a leader that carries them forward. They are not as successful now as they have been in the past but they continue as a profitable business.
I also look at what makes a successful country and can get some ideas from that.
The U.S. has been around for a few hundred years. I think the primary reason has been the founding father's ability to define the country and its values via the U.S. constitution. Every time there's a dispute we go back to it to remind us what the country is all about. So this means that if you define something similar to a constitution it is extremely important to the company's long term success for it to be well defined. What should be in it? That's the 100-year question. I have ideas but I don't really know.
I really don't think that it matters what the service or product is as long as it fills a need. Leadership and fidelity to core values are problably the key to staying around.
Here are some things I would consider absolutely essential:
1) A fundamentally simple governance structure. It could ultimately be huge or many-layered or whatever in practice but it has to be structurally simple enough that you can reason about how it is intended to handle any given thing. The worst kinds of cracks are liable to form if it encounters something unknown and has no mechanism either for handling it or deciding how to handle it.
2) The governance framework must be backed by a living document codifying policies which a) Are affirmative; b) Are as unambiguous as possible; c) Theoretically conflict with each other as little as possible; d) Include mechanisms for adjudicating policy conflicts; and e) Articulate their rationale. The company has to be willing to shut down rather than violate the most important of these policies. I like to call this approach "values nationalism."
3) The organization must evolve its formal policies as it makes decisions. Otherwise you're going to end up with common law. Reasonable minds can disagree about whether common law is a good idea in government but I'll venture to say it's always a bad idea in business.
4) The organization must be vigilant about predicting, monitoring, and mitigating internal threats to its integrity which arise out of perverse incentive structures. It must be willing to sacrifice short term money in order to eliminate perverse incentives.
5) The organization must have mechanisms in place which allow it radically reorganize itself in response to external threats (recession, regulatory capture, takeovers, etc.).
I may have left one or more important things out. But the vast majority of individual "business" issues are going to fall under one of these categories.